


On His Left

by aurilly



Category: Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Beating, Book: Psmith Journalist, Gangsters, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, New York City, Stoicism Under Pressure, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24200161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Mike gets kidnapped by gangsters.But Psmith definitely gets the worst of it.
Relationships: Mike Jackson/Rupert Psmith
Comments: 18
Kudos: 20
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	On His Left

**Author's Note:**

  * For [egelantier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/egelantier/gifts).



What American cricketers lacked in the variety of their bowling, Mike had decided, they made up for in sheer strength. Never before had he played against such sturdy types as these barn-sized Yankees. 

That said, the exposition match against the Yale team had gone splendidly. Mike had batted an easy century, with energy left over for a round of fielding. In only a couple of hours, he would be able to return to New York and see how Psmith was getting on. He'd received long letters and shockingly extravagant telegrams describing his progress with the newspaper and the tenements; however, although an amusing balm on the wound of Psmith's absence, Psmith's letters could neither fully capture nor replace his whimsical cadences. The team was not scheduled to return to New York for another three days, but Mike itched to get back to sooner than that so that he could surprise Psmith.

All in all, he was feeling in quite the spirits as he made his way from the pub in which the two teams had shared amicable drinks to the dormitory in which Yale was housing the athletes. His mind was occupied with happy thoughts of suggesting to Psmith that they enjoy an early dinner and perhaps a musical that evening. So, it came as a great shock to feel himself grabbed stoutly by meat-hook like hands, and have a bag thrust over his head. The assailants tied Mike's hands behind his back and shoved him into some sort of receptacle. 

When it came to fights, Mike had usually been able to hold his own, especially when Psmith had been with him. But these previous altercations had all been with men of at least moderate honour. The sort of men who at least addressed a chap before punching him in the face. The sort of men who welcomed a certain fisticuff repartee. However, this altercation lacked all nobility. What he was dealing with here were hooligans who threw a bag over one's head without so much as a "How do you do?"

Mike thrashed and yelled, but by the echoes all around him, and the jostling motion, he could tell that he was alone in what appeared to be the back of a now-moving truck. Eventually, he ran out of steam. He felt with his bound hands for the sides of his cage and rested his back against the walls. His bottom hurt from the endless bumps that he felt certain the driver was running over for Mike's benefit. He was angry, yes. Confused? Doubly. But Mike's was a largely phlegmatic nature; where more dramatic souls would have spent the ride in imaginative conjecture, Mike decided that he would wait and see the next step. Man was inherently lazy, Psmith had once told him. Not even the lowest form of man would go out of his way to bag a chap over the head and take him on a drive without purpose. (Also, Psmith had once told him, man is inherently stingy; and gasoline was expensive.)

Eventually, between a reduction in the speed, an increase in the severity of the pothole-incited bumps, and a growing cacophony surrounding the vehicle, Mike assumed that he had been taken back to New York. Whoever his kidnappers were, at least they had taken him in the direction he had been planning to go. Mike would have been even more annoyed to find himself in, say, Boston or Pittsburgh.

"You got 'im?" Mike heard a greasy-voiced man wheeze after they'd stopped. 

"Yeah, boss. Got the hot shot as he was coming out of a bar. He must have been too drunk to see us coming. The whole thing was a piece of cake. Plus, traffic was pretty good."

"Well," said the self-assured man who must have been the 'boss'. "We'll see if this'll help get his royal highness into a more cooperative mood."

As soon as he heard the doors of the truck open, Mike raised his voice to tell them exactly what he thought of them, as well as a good many other things. These hardened New Yorkers must have heard it all before, though, because they trundled him somewhere else without so much as a reply. The only thing Mike heard was, "They sure do talk funny, don't they? It tickles me to listen to them."

"And here I'd been hoping this one wouldn't talk as much as the other one. Makes my eyes water trying to make out what he's getting at."

"Well, if he keeps it up, I'll be able to see why they're such good friends."

"Nah, people that chatty don't usually want to hang around other motormouths. If you'd ever met my Aunt Sally, you'd understand."

This exchange was enough to make Mike see the light, even with a bag still over his head. Now he knew why he had been taken. Psmith's recent letters had intimated that things were getting a little hot down here. Mike had not realized how little artistic license informed the narrative. 

But what it meant was that Psmith had also been taken by these criminals. Psmith was somewhere, in trouble, and Mike was currently powerless to help him. He struggled anew.

"Now, now, kid. Just behave and everything'll work out fine for you."

At least they granted Mike's repeated request to restore his sight. The bag suddenly came off his head, and with it, he was also free of the smell of potatoes. He found himself in a long warehouse room whose only light came from a window at the far other end. The two men holding him could have been the cousins of the burly man who stood some feet in front of him, speaking to a man tied to a chair. The prisoner's back was to Mike, but Mike would have recognized the elegant line of Psmith's back, the now-torn grey wool check of Psmith's favorite morning suit—not to mention his commemorative Eton cufflinks—anywhere. 

Mike watched, aghast, and then with renewed efforts at struggle, as the gangster slapped Psmith, _hard_ across the face. He tried to yell, but the men holding him shoved a balled-up sock into his mouth (from the taste, fresh from one of their sweaty feet). Even without the gag, the bottling line in the room, not to mention the man pummeling Psmith, was making too much noise for anyone to hear Mike. And so, he was forced to watch helplessly as Psmith's head snapped from side to side. But no matter how hard the man hit him—and Mike could even make out a ring on his finger—Psmith's statuesque stillness did not waver. Psmith's only reaction to being beaten was a barely perceptible clenching of his long fingers after each strike; however, with his hands tied behind the chair back as they were, the man could not see. 

During a break in the machinery's workings, Mike heard Psmith cough thickly and say, through what sounded like a swollen lip, "And now, friend, if you would be so kind as to shift your focus to the other side. If I am to be bruised and bloodied about the face, I would prefer the matching set. Like a woman's rouge, the stuff must be applied to both cheeks in order to produce the correct effect."

The man hit Psmith again, so hard that the chair wobbled. Only Psmith sticking out a long leg to balance himself kept it from tipping over. 

"Are you left-handed by any chance? It would explain your dedication to this side of my face. Usually, they beat that out of children. Perhaps this explains some of your more violent proclivities. I did once read a study that reformed _gauchers_ such as yourself represent a disproportionate number of the prison population, likely to this repression of their natural instincts. I wonder, do you also write—lengthy and emotionally incisive diary entries, I assume—with the same hand? Or have you reclaimed its use merely for violence?"

"Will you," the man asked, punctuating each phrase with another strike to Psmith's face, and a heavy pant from the effort of it all, "or won't you, stop publishing those articles about the tenements?"

Psmith hung his head and shook it slightly, but his voice did not waver. "Usually a simple 'no' suffices, but I can see that you are a man requiring more compelling arguments, a sort of step-by-step _precis_ of the act of rationalizing. As you ask, so I will provide. I will begin first with the letter 'N'. Its origins—"

"Does this guy ever shut up?" the man asked his partners, the ones holding Mike. He must have only just realized that they had arrived. 

"Oh, a rhetorician, too?" Psmith asked, assuming the man was talking to him. "Delightful. Rhetoric was one of my preferred studies at Eton. To which of the philosophical branches do you subscribe? Personally, I favor Aristotle. In the original Greek, you understand. But many of my comrades at school swore by Plato. A little nouveau for my tastes, but I can understand some of the appeal."

Instead of an answer, Psmith got yet another strike, this time a wetter-sounding one. His already mussed hair went flying, the part long lost. 

"Shut it, you," said the heavy-handed man. "Let's see how tough you are in front of your pal, here."

"Our acquaintance has been short, Bill, may I call you Bill? I had not thought to count amongst your vast network of friends so quickly."

The man groaned and motioned at his partners. Mike was forced, pushed forward, and it gave him pleasure to deliver a solid kick to the shin of the man on his left side. However, all satisfaction disappeared when he caught sight of Psmith's face, and the blow—so much more powerful than any bejeweled meat-hook hand could deliver—that Mike's sudden appearance had struck him.

Finally seeing Psmith's face also caused Mike to freeze. Psmith's long face—never matinee-handsome, but possessing its own oddly compelling pleasantness—was a mottled mess of scratches and blood and bruises. His normally thin lips had indeed swelled to something resembling a bee victim. Worst of all, his monocle hung cracked and drooping over a ripped and blood-stained collar. Only now could Mike see that something had been done to Psmith's shoulder; it hung at a strange angle, as though yanked out of its socket. This had happened once to Mike, and he knew how painful it could be.

Mike tried to vent his despair at seeing Psmith reduced to such a state, but through the gag, all that came out was an angry, "Mmmphh."

"Comrade, as usual, you put it in a nutshell. But today, for perhaps the first time in our career together, I did not wish for your presence." Turning to the lead assailant, he continued, but this time his voice _did_ crack, and his posture _did_ buckle in pain, and his eyes _did_ flash panic and fear. "So, you have brought my friend here to add heft to your proposition, I see. A clever move. One that I did not think possible, given Comrade Jackson's absence from the city." 

"You clearly don't care about your own safety, but maybe you'll care about his." To test his hypothesis, the lead aggressor kicked Mike in the goolies. Mike, who had never attained the talent for statuesque stoicism that Psmith had, until the last minute, maintained, fell to his knees with a groan. A second kick, this time to his mouth, dropped him the rest of the way, until he was writhing on the floor. 

Psmith, who had not made a sound when he'd been the one getting thrashed, moaned softly with each impact Mike received.

"Mind his face, gentlemen. I would see that fine Roman nose unmarred."

The only benefit of this turn of events was that the kicking dislodged the gag. "Smith!" Mike cried.

"I am sorry, Comrade. I am sorry that my quest led to this."

"Sorry enough to drop it?" asked one of Mike's kidnappers, joining the conversation for the first time. 

"Don't mind me, Smith. Don't give 'em what they want." 

Psmith smiled sadly, wincing when the motion caused pain to his bruised lips. "They have found my Achilles heel. Well played, gentlemen. If you will please let him be."

"So, you'll give it up?"

Psmith hung his head again, and in the distance, during this next pause in the bottling line's break, Mike thought he discerned the faint sound of a police siren, growing louder. 

With more self-assurance than a man tied to a chair ought ever to have had, Psmith replied, "It seems that I must return to my sadly interrupted explanation of the word, 'No.' The game is up, my good men. The police are on their way. Enough hours have passed without word from me, which means that Comrade Windsor, as planned, has sounded the alarm. The cry has gone up. The men in blue approach. If two bloodied men in bonds are not enough to tip them off to the level of crime being committed here, that bottling line for underground hooch certainly will be."

The sirens had grown deafening by now. The men took off at a run, but did not make it far before the policemen rounded them all up. 

It took almost an hour for Psmith and Mike to finish their briefings, and for Mike to replace Psmith's arm in its socket. Psmith hiccuped in pain as he did it, but he looked up at Mike in the kind of gratitude that made Mike long for everyone to leave so that he could kiss Psmith's wounds properly.

Finally, they were put into a taxi and sent to their flat, with a request to make more statements at the station the next day. They rode in silence, and the only acknowledgement of what had happened was how they held hands. Normally, they did not engage in such dangerous public excesses, but Mike was beyond words (more-so than usual), and had decided to risk it. 

"What do you think for the evening, Comrade?" Psmith asked when they entered their suite at the Plaza.

"I'm going to get you into a nice hot bath. And order room service. And…" 

"And proof my next editorial?"

Mike held Psmith, who finally, now in private, allowed himself to slacken and fall. Mike undressed him piece by piece, helped him into the bath, and kissed him on each and every bruise. Only once he felt satisfied that Psmith had stopped shaking, did he say, "I'll find a pen. If you haven't yet written it, you can dictate it for me. I'll transcribe."

"I can always count on you, Comrade."


End file.
